Building a Bridge to a Legacy Application - How Hard Can that Be?

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Presented at BSidesKnoxville 2019 by

M. Ford

My team loves working on legacy code projects. It's all that we do. That's why a friend of mine reached out to us for some help. _x000D__x000D_His startup was building out a universal API across a very fragmented industry with little to no interoperability or standards. Up until now, integrating with the systems in that industry had been pretty easy, because the companies that built them were willing to help. _x000D__x000D_But now he'd found one that wasn't willing to help. There was no obvious API for getting data out of the legacy application so that it could be exposed via his company's API. A big client for his company was riding on his ability to be able to pull this off. He remembered how much I loved a challenge and how much my team loved legacy code, so he figured we were his best shot._x000D__x000D_The goal was to be able to read from the application's database. _x000D__x000D_In this talk, I'll cover _x000D_* the different approaches that we took_x000D_* the one we really wanted to try because we thought it would be fun_x000D_* the approaches that we needed to try before we could attempt the fun one_x000D_* the excitement that we felt while working on it_x000D_* the grind toward completion once the big technical hurdle was crossed_x000D_* the sense of achievement when we got a read-only solution built_x000D_* the hope that we'd get the green light to start working on a read-write solution_x000D_* the disappointment when the plug got pulled and we weren't authorized to proceed any further_x000D__x000D_It was a fun journey, and I'd love to be able to share it.